Passage West

Thank you so much to everyone for all your wonderful congratulations and warm thoughts and...really...just for being out there. I hope I give voice to all of us together--because we truly are in this together. I've responded directly to those of you whose email addresses I could find, but to those I could not, please know your kind words, the fact that you've kept reading me, your warm spirits out there in the great world have kept me going.

Please check back for updates on the book and I hope to meet you all soon in person.

Warmly,

Caitlin.

Dearest and Closest,

Three days ago, I wrote this:

This has been the most beautiful September in Maine I can ever remember. It’s been warm—sometimes close to eighty degrees, the sun cascading out of the sky with a je m’en foutisme which makes you smile and shake your head. The leaves are already turning, the water at the beach is still bearable to swim in and so blue and clean in that way that only happens under the intense blue of a fall sky and the sand is hot and massaging on the feet. The strawberries have reseeded and so we’ve got apples and tomatoes and strawberries all at the same time at the market. The basil is lush and feathery, the lettuces dark and crisp. There have been moments since we moved into our apartment almost a month ago, now, when, my son sitting in his highchair eating little pieces of apple or late summer peach, some mashed egg yolk or tahini mixed with rice and blue berries, the sun going down through the window over his shoulder in purpley pink streaks and his face as bright as a Halloween pumpkin,  that I’ve felt the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t know if it’s my son and his wonderful, open, honest face, or the grateful joy I feel that our lives are coming back into some recognizable form, or that I’m home again, home again and despite all my big city dreams I’m back somewhere where I know who I am, what I’m made of. Maybe some combination.

We’ve been broke and eating a lot of vegetables, hummus and pretzels, bread from the local market and eggs in every way you can imagine (hard boiled, fried, baked, scrambled, etc). But, strangely, it doesn’t feel like the broke we were when everything collapsed in LA. Something about LA is so totally alienating when you have no money. The whole culture costs money and is about consuming in a way that it’s hard not to feel totally left out. I remember when we were so scared, going to Ralph’s, the local chain, and trying to shop for three days with twenty dollars. I remember how depressing it felt and the compromises in nutrition and taste we were totally willing to make to survive and take care of our son, but that when we walked out into the shopping plaza and everyone around us seemed to be piling their Lexus and Mercedes cars with groceries and clothes, holding Starbucks and Peaberry yogurts, their hands manicured and their clothes immaculate, it felt like, is it just us?  No one seemed to feel anything we felt. Sometimes it felt enraging, like the whole culture was leaving us behind and letting us fall apart on our own.

Dan is gone a lot. He gets up at 4:30 AM on Tuesdays and bikes on Frank’s bike to the bus station and then goes to Boston. He gets home around 4. Then the whole thing repeats on Wednesday and Thursday, except those days he leaves in the mid-morning and comes home at night. Sometimes, he says, he misses us so much he can hardly stand it. Every night I make him the same lunch and put it in a bag in the fridge: two crunchy peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches with a tiny sprinkle of salt, often on rye bread (toasted), a jar of hummus (I make A LOT of hummus these days, it’s cheap and filling and I roast peppers and garlic and throw it in with some lemon, parsley, black pepper, olive oil and tahini), a bag of pretzels, three apples, and a thermos of coffee (cold, sadly).  He eats it all on the bus rides while he does his reading. He’s now gotten a new bartending job closer to home at an amazing restaurant we’ve always loved. So, he’s, at least, not traveling to Brunswick, too. But he’s there on Friday nights and Sunday days. With Dan gone so much M. and Hopper and I go everywhere together. We go to the beach, to the supermarket, we go for walks, we eat dinner together—the three of us are inseparable. Ever since we’ve moved here and since Ellison died, Hopper hates being alone. The two times I’ve left him while I went of with M., I’ve heard him scratching the door and whining—things he’s never done before. I understand. No one likes to be left behind, especially when our lives have been so tenuous seeming and full of such constant upheaval. So, I take him with me.

But something is starting to settle for all of us. It feels like a wide fisherman’s net, full of jellyfish and starfish and crabs and seaweed, has started to get pulled in from a long long distance. This net has been very far out in the water and it’s got some holes. The tide is working against us sometimes but it’s coming in, reeling towards us. The holes are losing little bits of carapace and old, dead seaweed, but what’s hanging on is this amazing catch of wonderful, mysterious creatures all brimming with life and light, each one with a story to tell, an experience to teach. And that’s how my life feels—like a jewel box made of an old ripped, net full of earthly and unearthly pleasures, all opening up and breathing and showing me how to live in the world. Or something like that.

The other night, when I was alone, my dear friends Ken and Kamalah invited M. and me over for pizza. Dan had the car, so Ken offered to pick us up. We sat in the late September air on their porch and ate his homemade mozzarella pizza and salad. Later, when we drove home, I reached into the back seat to touch M.’s knee as he bravely sat in a car he didn’t recognize, a car seat not his own and the thought, I’m sure, going through his head, “Wait, who’s that guy up front with Mom??? Where’s Dada?”  He reached out, and with a smile that was part bravery, part I need you, part I love you and I just want to hold you, he grabbed my hand and held it fast. My heart literally broke and expanded at the same time.

Later that night I emailed one of my best friends, Tim, and told him this and he said, “You know Caitlin, maybe it’s when we’re most broke that we expand—something like that.”

He is right on so many levels—Dan, M., Hopper—all of us—we have been given so much during this time so how could be begrudge the hard? It’s taught us to expand.

*    *    *

I had stopped there. I didn’t know where to go and how to end. I was tired and wanted to wait until the morning to see if I should end there or just delete the whole messy thing.

And then my life, our lives, my son’s life, changed in a few hours yesterday. And when I say changed, I mean our fates took a totally new turn.

Yesterday, at 5 PM, my book based on this blog, this very thing I’ve been pestering you all with for over a year now, these very words you probably sometimes want to, or even do, delete because as my OB and friend Dr. Ghozland once pointed out  “You’re the longest writer in the world!” was sold to be made into a book which will be released next winter. And, like that, with sixteen dollars in the bank account and no idea how we were going to pay next week’s bills, our lives totally changed.

There is a lot of work ahead. I have to deliver a whole book by early spring, Dan has to stay in school, we have a lot of putting back together of the disaster of our financial lives. But now we can do all that and we can do it carefully and well.

So, dear reader, dear family, dearest friends, here’s the thing: that missive I started three days ago was going to be my final one to this whole journey I’ve called “Passage West.” Why? Because I felt this journey out and back to California had come to a close and a new chapter had begun. And now, with this new start, this totally brave new world opening up to us, we really have been given a new beginning. And because of that I feel it is right to end this story here. 

 But, before I go, I want to say thank you. Thank you for reading me. Thank you for supporting me and us. You, here on this list, have given so much of yourselves to us—whether in helping us with money to get home across the country, helping us pack to go chase our dreams in California and, then, helping us unpack when we got home and felt so broken; you have helped us with kind words and places to stay and meals and encouragement, love and care and gifts and, more than anything, you kept believing in us when we weren’t sure we did anymore. You’ve kept us going. Without you, this would not have been possible—and I mean this because without you reading and writing back, I might never have continued and might never have had the guts to tell this story with all its corners of joy and fear. So, thank you. I hope I can repay in small and large ways as time goes by.

I also want to say thank you to the strangers who have reached out to me and us since they first heard us on NPR. Sarah, in Kansas, has sent prayers and love every step of our journey. Your words, Sarah, kept us going night after night on the road. Barrie, Gwen, Anne...many many people and names and voices, you reached out with the offers of places to stay and kind wishes and kept writing me and I thank you. You gave us back our belief in America.

And with that, I sign off for now with this blog. I may start another one sometime—and if I do I’ll let you all know so you can hit “delete” again and relish it. In the meantime, I’ll work to tell our story, and the story you’ve been a part of, the story that is all our stories about the recession, being an American and following dreams, the best that I can.

Much love,

Caitlin, Dan, Hopper and M.

For Ellison, who is with me still at every moment as I write this.

Today we celebrated September with a walk on the beach.  I didn't expect to swim and wasn't wearing my bathing suit. But the water was so perfect, so inviting--it beckoned me with the deep bone knowledge that soon it will be frozen and my body won't feel so open to the world around me. So, I jumped in, in my bra and underwear as Dan, M. and Hopper waited on the beach. As I dove and came up for air, dove and came up for air, over and over again like a porpoise, the golden September light dazzling me each time my eyes opened, the water pouring off me in salty rivulets, I thought: I can forgive the world anything today. Anything. I can forgive everything in my life that's hard. I can forgive everyone. I can forgive. I am feeling too much joy to begrudge any hardship, any pain, any anything. And for the first time in a long long time I felt...not just happy, but, elated. 

Love, Caitlin.

  

Dearest and Closest,

Yesterday I took what I fear may have been my last swim of the season. It was cold. The water, as my mother has rightly described it, felt like chilled white wine on my skin. As I came up for air, my breath halting in my throat, my chest heaving, I felt an urge to yell  “YES! I’M ALIVE AND I LOVE MY LIFE!” The end of summer in Maine is a reckless time; you jump into water that’s cooled to a temperature beyond what’s comfortable because you must, you grab and eat a fresh tomato like an apple, the seeds and juice streaming down your chin and onto a white summer blouse because, like the water, you already miss what you’re losing. I always feel like I’m just starting to live my summer and then, like that, it’s gone. Today the skies opened up and poured buckets of water endlessly all day long, the wind came sluicing off the bay and across the Eastern Prom, the temperatures hovering around fifty and, all of a sudden, fall was around the corner. In an email letter from my hometown Reverand Rob McCall, who married Dan and me and will baptize M. this fall,  I  received these words of wisdom today: ” … from the 8th century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod: It will not always be summer: build barns.” Yes. And yes.

Dan is bartending tonight. I’m working on a new audio diary for NPR. Our apartment is coming together, but slowly, because we’re both exhausted. Dan starts school in ten days. We’re nervous—things are harder than we had hoped, but, honestly, I wonder why I ever thought things might get easy right now? This may be the knife’s edge—we’ve hiked up and up and up and now, finally, I imagine, is the tight rope we’re going to walk for a time to get to the solid ground we need and want.  The bartending job Dan got is making less than was promised (and we needed), it’s harder and slower getting an apartment together with a baby than we ever really imagined, I am overwhelmed by the work I need to do in the midst of all the other life things that need to get done and Dan has been sick. But I’m getting glimpses of what may be our quotidian—our lovely apartment, my walks with M. and Hopper around the neighborhood in the evenings when Dan’s working, my walks (and swims) alone with Hopper on Mackworth Island and our meals together as a family (M. in his highchair taking his requisite two bites of a late summer peach puréed in the Cuisinart my aunt Mary gave us as a wedding present and us piling our plates with the bounty of the farmer’s market). We’re feeding he baby twice a day and he’s finally on a schedule-- going to bed at 7 and waking up at 7, with the occasional party from 3:30 AM until 5 AM. Today I took both naps with him, morning and afternoon, and woke feeling even more tired. I think the tired I feel is larger than just a move—it’s tired from months and months of stress and the desire my body has to just say, “Ok, we’re staying here, in one place, we’re making a home here. I can’t move again.” My mind is afraid to commit to what my body needs, of course. It keeps thinking: “Something, anything, could go wrong.” It’s been fight and flight all mixed up together for too long and my mind won’t relax.

But the truth is that something better, more solid, safer than we’ve had (or allowed ourselves to feel for a long time) feels so close I can almost taste it. And it tastes like late summer--nostalgically laced with the sadness of and end to something and then, also, with the warm golden light of the shortening days, the excitement of something else begun. Something, maybe, even, better than ever before.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, Hopper and M.

There’s an addendum to the post I shared last night, which is really more important than anything else I wrote. This is the take home message, if you will. But, I got too tired and I forgot. This morning there was a hole for me in what I needed, wanted, to say.

When we drove up to my mother’s after the restaurant guy and the anniversary and the heat and all the moving of things she welcomed us with an anniversary dinner of lobsters and salad from her garden and crusty French bread, beer, wine and a cherry crisp. I made some homemade frozen yogurt with cardamom, vanilla, cinnamon and lemon rinds and, later, after dinner, with M. unwilling to go to bed, we all sang songs to him—Amazing Grace, Froggy Went a Courtin’, The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night, If I Had a Hammer, From a Distance, etc--and danced in the living room. Pure transformative joy emanated from all of us and M.'s face was so light, so true, so totally engaged. Later, when I went outside with Hopper to pee, the lights of the house made golden orbs on the dark, lush grass. It occurred to me how personal and private joy like that—an eruption of song and dance—in the middle of the woods, is. The world around us enveloped and accepted our eruption as a part of itself and then it all went quiet, again, holding onto our joy in the still, warm air for us.

Later, before bed, I went up to my mother’s room and asked her to go for a swim. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that—gone night swimming—which is odd for a child growing up on the coast of Maine. But, maybe I have, when I was a teenager. She surprised me and accepted. Together, some time after ten PM, we drove down the road with Hopper and jumped in a deep spring tide, the water all the way up to the road. It was cool and clean, dark and utterly wonderful. We laughed in spite of ourselves and because of ourselves.

No matter what else has happened, this is what I came 3000 miles back across the country for. This is my home. This is land that makes sense to me, water that smells and tastes right, family that is my anchor. And this is joy—nights like this. I remember thinking at one point during the night as we danced and sang, our own private party, that I couldn’t remember feeling so light, so happy for a long time. Joy, pure, unadulterated, is the best thing we can give each other when times are tough. And, sometimes, the purest joy comes from being with family and at one with the natural world.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, Hopper and M.